Yesterday, on King Street, a man claimed to see the Ikea Monkey. “It’s the Ikea Monkey!” he shouted. I was behind him on the sidewalk. As soon as he yelled, I expected the crowds to freeze, traffic to screech to a halt. I whirled, breathless, searching for an adorable rhesus macaque. But there was no rhesus macaque. There was just a young man in a duffle coat, with shiny little eyes. He looked a little melancholy. “Haha, Jake,” said the first man, the one who pointed. “You look like the Ikea Monkey.”

Jake said nothing. Jake seemed sad, beset-upon: a man in a duffle coat, alone in a cruel city.

I walked on. That was much less interesting than an Ikea monkey, I thought to myself. Like everyone else in the industrialized world, I have been spellbound by the tale of Darwin the Montreal macaque: that poor primate, lost in Toronto, scampering and posing outside a showroom of Swedish furniture. I too have done my share of darting — combing through Ikea Monkey newspaper articles and poring over Ikea Monkey photographs and wondering what it is that makes Darwin so essential to the emotional here-and-now of late 2012.

Yes, Darwin is cute. He is a little sweetheart in his sheepskin coat, loping down the parking lot or standing by a window. Like so many little animals, macaques tickle that part of our brainstem that falls for tiny creatures with big heads and moony eyes — for babies, basically. Sociobiologists would argue that a love for the Ikea Monkey is in our essential DNA. Evolution itself wants us to clutch our hearts and go, “Awwwww!”

Yet the Ikea Monkey means more than this.

As cute as he may be, Darwin is not just a prime example of homo sapiens’ neotenic impulse, forged over millennia. I cannot be the only person who feels that those blurry Instagram photos seem somehow like visual art, or poetry. Like a haiku about this modern age:

Ikea Monkey

learns the emptiness of a

new Billy bookcase.

At this time of year, many of us feel a little lost. The air hums with carols, the city swarms with shoppers, daylight pours away. Whether we are jostling down aisles of chipboard decor, squeezing onto streetcars, or sitting in our own vehicles, on backed-up exit ramps, we can feel like strangers in a hostile land. Like drifters in a flashing, cacophonous winter jubilee. Wanderers outside a mobbed Ikea of the soul.

When Darwin escaped from his owners’ parked car, he must at first have felt elation. All this freedom — hundreds of metres of asphalt and SUVs, shopping trolleys full of Lacks and Gorms, kids with lingonberry jam on their faces. But the jubilation must have given way to fear. Why is everyone staring? Where am I safe? Where are the people who truly care about me?

Though the Ikea Monkey didn’t make it much past Ikea’s gasping automatic doors, we have all imagined him loose inside, running rampant through imaginary living-rooms, past fake fireplaces and empty dining-room tables, simulacra of homes. All around him, shrieking strangers, camera flashes, Camus crossed with Scandinavian design. Darwin does not seem happy in any of the photographs I’ve seen. He looks bewildered and adrift, like someone who has just discovered how big and hostile this world really is. Yes, he has his sheepskin coat. But he is still, at the heart of things, alone.

That’s a lot of alienation to project onto a 6-month-old rhesus macaque.

Now, Darwin has been picked up by Toronto Animal Services and delivered to a primate sanctuary. “He’s had a little bit of a bad day,” their spokesman said. The monkey’s not alone in this. But unlike Darwin, most of us are still marooned in parking lots, toddling through mazes, gazing out through windows, for solace. We are crossing the street, like Jake in his duffle coat, teased by bozos.

Don’t we all want to find our own Story Book Farms? Somewhere we can gambol, eat bananas, and be decent to one another? If the Ikea Monkey has taught us one thing, it’s that rhesus macaques look great in double-breasted shearling coats. But if it’s taught us two things, it’s to look out for the primates around us, the big and the small alike, the ones wearing pants and the ones who are not, all of us staring forlornly through the glass.

Sean Michaels is a writer, critic, and founder of the music blog Said the Gramophone. His debut novel is forthcoming in 2014.

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